Hook, Line and Shotgun Bride

by Cassie Miles

  “What was he after?”

  “Being apprehended wasn’t the intruder’s primary concern. He wanted to frighten Angela. He might be a stalker. Or somebody who has a personal grudge.” He turned to Angela. “Have you received threats?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I recall.”

  “Maybe from a disgruntled employee,” he suggested. “Or someone associated with the restaurant. A supplier. Even an angry customer. Take your time. Think about it.”

  She sank into a chair beside the table. Her shoulders slumped. A moment ago, he’d been critical of Neil for treating her like a patient. Now, he was interrogating her like a victim.

  As her friend, he knew what she needed. He’d seen Angela through the worst time in her life—after her husband was killed. She needed his support. Even though her fiancé was standing right there, Shane sat in the chair next to her and gave her a hug. “If you don’t want to deal with this now, it’s okay. We can wait until—”

  “I want to get it over with,” she said. “I’m thinking. But I can’t come up with anybody who wants to hurt me. A couple of months ago, I fired a waitress, but she got another job.”

  Gently, he said, “Have you noticed anything unusual? Maybe had the feeling you were being watched?”

  “I’ve been kind of spooked. Nervous, you know. Especially at night.”

  He considered the possibility of a peeper. Not usually a violent criminal. But this guy had opened windows. He seemed to be planning something more than just watching. “Earlier, we talked about moving you and Benjy to Neil’s house.”

  “It’s the obvious solution,” Neil said. “I suggest that we get everything packed up and make that move right now.”

  She stood and confronted them both. “I don’t want to frighten Benjy. We’re staying here tonight, and that’s final.”

  A muscle in Neil’s jaw twitched, but he conceded. “All right, Angela. We’ll do this your way. Have you at least called the police?”

  “I don’t want to,” she said stubbornly. “There’s nothing the police can do.”

  “You’re being unreasonable.”

  Shane wouldn’t have been so blunt, but he agreed with Neil on this point. “The police can dust for fingerprints, look for trace evidence and talk to your neighbors.”

  “I don’t want any more investigating. Not now. Not ever again.” Her eyes flashed with anger. “The police did plenty of investigating when Tom died. To what end? They still didn’t find his killer. All their poking around was a waste of time. If you gentlemen will please excuse me, I’m going to bed.”

  She turned on her heel and left the room.

  Shane’s natural instinct was to follow her, to soothe her worries and offer comfort. But that wasn’t his job. He looked toward Neil, expecting him to follow his fiancé and make sure she was all right.

  Instead, Neil checked his wristwatch. “This is a waste of time. I have a lot going on with work, especially since I’ll be gone for a couple of weeks on honeymoon. Coming here tonight was incredibly inconvenient.” He glared at Shane. “And I didn’t expect to find you.”

  Shane offered no excuses for his presence. Though he’d been planning to stay at a motel, he’d responded to the urgency in Angela’s voice when she invited him.

  “I suppose,” Neil said, “that you’ll be staying the night.”

  “I’m not going to leave her and Benjy unprotected.”

  “Fine. I’d stay myself but I’m in the midst of some very important meetings.”

  What could be more important than the safety of his bride and her son? Shane kept that opinion to himself.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll get them moved,” Neil said. “I have plenty of room at my house. You’re welcome to stay there until the wedding.”

  Considering what had happened tonight, it was generous for him to offer. “I appreciate your hospitality.”

  “It’s no trouble. My housekeeper hired people to help out until after the wedding, and I have other houseguests. I believe you know one of them—Dr. Edgar Prentice from Aspen.”

  “We’ve met.”

  “He’s a fertility specialist and an ob-gyn. Your cousin Tom sought my uncle out when he decided that he and Angela should go through the process of creating frozen embryos.”

  “I know.”

  “In a way, Uncle Edgar was Angela’s midwife, even though he didn’t deliver Benjy. Ironic. Now, I’ll be Benjy’s father.”

  “Stepfather,” Shane corrected. Nobody but Tom should be recognized as the father of Angela’s child.

  “I’ll see to Angela now.”

  As he watched Neil stride toward Angela’s bedroom, Shane wanted to stop him. Neil wasn’t the right man for her. He was cold and arrogant and sure as hell didn’t put Angela first. None of my business. Shane didn’t have the right to tell her who to marry or what to do with her life.

  He sat at the kitchen table, took the last macadamia nut cookie from the plate and bit into it.

  When Angela lashed out against law enforcement, he hadn’t been surprised. Shane had listened to hours of her complaints about how the Park County Sheriff’s Department had failed to bring her husband’s murderer to justice. She’d gotten to the point where she refused to even talk to them.

  That had been his job.

  The investigators had compiled quite a bit of evidence. The flat tire was caused by three nails that could have been picked up from any number of construction sites in the mountains. The indentations in Tom’s SUV indicated that he’d been hit by a truck, and the crime scene investigators found bits of black paint. From the tire tracks, they could tell that after Tom was hit, the truck backed up and hit him again.

  The police theory was that the driver of the truck was drunk or otherwise incapacitated. After he hit Tom, he backed up to see if he could help and accidentally ran into Tom a second time. The driver had gotten out of his car and had left a fingerprint in Tom’s blood on the Toyota.

  The print matched nothing in the database, and the cops had other factors working against them: It had taken over two hours to locate Tom’s body. There were no witnesses. They’d never been able to locate the black truck.

  The final conclusion from the Park County Sheriff’s Department was vehicular homicide. The driver of the black truck was never found.

  Shane understood Angela’s pain and frustration, but he knew the investigators had done their best to solve the case. A hit-and-run accident was cold-blooded—the kind of case that would haunt the investigative team almost as much as it troubled Shane.

  His instincts told him that Tom’s death wasn’t an accident. He was targeted, mowed down on purpose. Shane believed that Tom’s death was premeditated murder.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Angela felt like a new woman. Her usual schedule meant jumping out of bed at four in the morning and dashing like mad to have Waffles ready for business at six-thirty. Not this week. While planning the last details of the wedding, she had enough on her plate, so to speak. Though she might stop by the restaurant and help out, they weren’t expecting her.

  With no need to rush, she took a long, luxurious shower. When she meandered into kitchen after eight o’clock, Shane had already made coffee and fed Benjy. He greeted her with a grin and a joke about sleeping late. What an amazing friend! He made her laugh, always made her feel comfortable.

  And he wasn’t bad to look at in his jeans and cowboy boots. His black hair was in need of a trim before the wedding. Not that any of the women in attendance would notice. They’d be too busy swooning over his sky-blue eyes and rugged masculine features. It was hard to believe Shane was still single. There had been a couple of live-in girlfriends over the years, but he’d never once walked down the aisle.

  After they dropped off Benjy at the babysitter, she slipped behind the steering wheel of her van and turned to Shane. “Before I stop by Waffles, I have to pop into the dress shop for a final fitting on the wedding gown. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Bring on the ruffles and
lace,” he said. “I told you I’d do anything to help, and I meant it.”

  “Oh, good.” The very idea of super-macho Shane in a dress shop amused her. “After the gown, we can go to the florist, then stop by the lingerie store.”

  He groaned. “As long as I don’t have to have my toenails painted pink. Isn’t the maid of honor supposed to do this stuff?”

  “Yvonne’s busy running Waffles. But don’t worry. I’m sure I can come up with some manly, testosterone-driven tasks for you, too.”

  “Like moving you and Benjy to Neil’s house?”

  She hadn’t planned on making that move until she and Neil got back from their two-week honeymoon in Baja. Even then, it would be difficult. His house was far from her work, her favorite market and everything she was familiar with. “It’s so inconvenient.”

  “But safe,” he said.

  It hadn’t escaped her notice that he was wearing his holster under a lightweight summer blazer. Shane definitely took her intruder seriously.

  Not like Neil. She didn’t like the way he’d reacted last night. In his opinion, she was having panic attacks, and he wasn’t going to change his mind. Though she admired her fiancé for his decisiveness, she wished that he’d listen to her side of the story.

  “After you’re married,” he said, “how are you planning to run Waffles? You’re at the south end of the metro area in Littleton and Neil’s almost in Boulder.”

  “Neil wants me to quit.”

  “But you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t know.” She’d given the issue so much thought that her head ached. “It’s a bridge I’ll cross when I come to it.”

  She turned off the main road into the four-block area known as Old South Clarkson Street. With several boutiques and restaurants, it was a pleasant, neighborhood place for specialty shopping. On weekends, traffic closed down in the morning for a farmers’ market.

  She drove past Waffles, pleased to see that the tables they set up on the sidewalk for summer were all filled. Around back in the alley, she pulled into her parking space.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Shane asked. “I thought we were going to look at a dress.”

  “It’s only four stores down.”

  She hopped out of the car and started down the alley. Though Shane’s legs were a mile longer than hers, they walked at the same relaxed pace. When they were together, life seemed to take on a more natural tempo, almost as though he carried the easygoing mountain lifestyle with him.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said. “You’re not the only one who’s making changes.”

  He was always steady and predictable, someone she could count on. “What are you up to?”

  “I’m moving to Denver.”

  “Leaving the mountains? You?”

  “I’m turning thirty this year, and I looked around and saw that I was doing the same thing every day. Arresting the same drunks on the weekend. Driving the same roads. Living in the same house I was born in.”

  “Is this because your parents aren’t in Silver Plume anymore?”

  “Maybe so.” He shrugged. “Mom and Dad moved to Phoenix two years ago. And my sister’s in New York City. But this really isn’t about family. It’s about me.”

  “And you want to try something different.”

  “I’m taking a job with a Denver-based security firm. At first, I’ll be doing bodyguard work, but there’s training available. I want to get into computers. And I’ve been learning to fly a helicopter. Man, there is nothing like being up in the sky.”

  When she looked up at him, she saw a spark of excitement in his blue eyes. “I’m happy for you, Shane.”

  “Time goes fast. I didn’t want to turn around and find myself turning into a sixty-year-old man who never left Silver Plume.”

  She opened the rear door to Linda’s Dress Shoppe and went inside. There was nobody in the storeroom, which was typical. She called out, “Anybody home?”

  Linda, the proprietor, stuck her head into the back room. “Hi, Angela. I’m busy out here. You go ahead and put on the gown. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  There was an informal sewing area in the corner with tables for cutting fabric, a couple of armless dress forms and a rack of clothes zipped into black garment bags with Linda’s logo emblazoned on the front. A hot pink label stuck to one of the bags had Angela’s name.

  Since she hadn’t wanted a fancy gown for her second marriage, she’d picked out a strapless dress with a bit of lace and a matching jacket to cover her shoulders when it got colder at night.

  Shane stood beside a sewing table. “This is strange.”

  “What?”

  “Right here, next to the scissors and spools, there’s a kitchen knife.”

  When she took a closer look, anxiety shot through her. “It’s a boning knife. And it’s mine.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The red dot on the handle.” No one was allowed to touch her chef knives. When she wasn’t using them, she kept them tucked away in a locker in the restaurant office.

  She unzipped the garment bag, pushed the plastic aside and stared in shock. Her wedding gown had been slashed to ribbons.

  Chapter Four

  Unable to believe what she was seeing, Angela tugged the ragged edge of the ripped white fabric. The skirt had been sliced multiple times. Bits of lace hung like entrails around the bodice. The gown was ruined beyond repair.

  Scared and confused, she turned away. On the table was the boning knife—her knife! Was it possible that she had done this? She couldn’t remember. Had she suffered a blackout?

  The thought terrified her. True, she hadn’t been in her right mind lately. The lack of sleep and stress had taken their toll. Last night, she’d imagined headlights crashing through her kitchen window. But she hadn’t gone completely insane. Not yet, anyway.

  Shane touched her shoulder. In a low voice, he asked, “What do you want to do?”

  For one thing, she didn’t want Linda to see this disaster. The owner of the dress shop would have too many questions, and Angela didn’t have answers. “Get me out of here.”

  “Done.”

  He tossed the knife into the garment bag with the dress and zipped it up just as Linda bustled into the back room with her long, silk scarf flowing behind her.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said. “I had a mixup with the register. Thought I’d lost a hundred and fifty bucks. Then I remembered that I went to the bank last night.”

  Linda was a lovable scatterbrain. But not crazy. Not like me. She thought of Neil’s diagnosis that she needed to see a psychologist. He might be right.

  While Shane introduced himself, she gathered her wits, hoping to appear normal. Not that she needed to worry. When she was with Shane, other women hardly noticed her existence. Even without his hat, he was one hundred percent sexy cowboy.

  He beamed a slow smile at Linda and said, “Angela is having second thoughts about the dress. She wants to take it home and decide if this is actually what she wants to wear.”

  “Brides are all the same.” Linda grinned up at him. “Always fussing about the details. When I got married, I was as nervous as a squirrel on a highway, jumping from one median to another.”

  When Angela forced herself to speak, her voice seemed to be detached from her body. “Remember that white suit I tried on before?”

  “Indeed, I do. To tell the truth, I liked you better in that outfit than in the gown. The suit seemed more…” Linda flipped the end of her scarf and chuckled. “More suitable.”

  “We’ll take both of them with us,” Shane said. “Then, Angela can make her decision later.”

  “Fine with me,” Linda said. “But you still need alterations on the gown, Angela. You’ve been losing weight, and a strapless bodice needs to fit like a second skin.”

  While Shane went to the front of the store with Linda to make arrangements, Angela let down her guard. She sank onto a stool beside the cutt
ing table and stared, unfocused. What was wrong with her? The inside of her head whirled like a blender. The shelves and boxes in the storeroom seemed to be closing in on her. She was suffocating.

  She didn’t remember taking the knife from the restaurant, and she sure as hell didn’t recall attacking her dress. Was she sleepwalking? Had she done this in a blackout? It didn’t happen. Dammit, I’m not crazy.

  But if she hadn’t done this, that meant someone else had. Everybody who worked in this area knew that Linda often neglected to lock the back door, and Angela’s dress had been sitting here for several days, unguarded.

  She stared at the garment bag. Who could have done this? Why did they want to sabotage her wedding?

  SHANE ESCORTED HER through the alley. Though his hands were occupied with holding both dress bags, he was prepared to toss them aside if he saw an approaching threat. Last night, Angela had an intruder. This morning, her gown was attacked. Clearly, someone wanted to hurt her—or at the very least, terrorize her.

  Adrenaline pumped through his veins, making him hypervigilant. Ironically, he realized that he was acting as her bodyguard. In a few weeks, that would be his regular job at PRESS—Premier Executive Security Systems. No longer a small-town deputy sheriff, he was already stepping into the world of big-city dangers.

  When she clicked the lock to open her van, he placed the garment bags in the back and turned to her. “We can’t ignore what happened.”

  “We can try.” Avoiding eye contact, she opened the driver’s-side door. “I still need to check with the florist and make sure the bouquets are—”

  “The daisies will wait.” He caught hold of her arm, stopping her before she shot off in a different direction. “We need to figure out who did this.”

  “How did you know about the daisies?”

  “They’re your favorite flower. White daisies.” When she married Tom, it was winter and she settled for white roses. Now daisies were in season.